Morningstar displays his dismal misunderstanding of microbiology

        Internet woo radio, it seems, is falling over itself in its eagerness to give a platform to Robert Morningstar and his erroneous ideas. Today it was the turn of The Higherside Chats to offer us all an hour of our lives that we can never get back.

        AM* happened to touch on two topics that I know a lot about, and in both cases showed such a calamitous misunderstanding that it almost literally took my breath away. Here's the first, in his exact words:

18:39 "About three years ago, a few NASA scientists came out and said that they had found a special form of life in Mono Lake, California, which was based on arsenic. It was a cell, or a culture, that reproduced itself and its metabolism and its life cycle was based not on carbon but on arsenic of all things ... And the premise of this revelation was --- her name was Dr. Wolf, and she had a hyphenated name, but I only remember Dr Wolf, or Wolfson. But she said a very interesting thing. She said the important thing about their finding was that the search for life as we have conducted it for the last 40 years -- life on Mars, life on the Moon, life anywhere -- has been conducted through too narrow a window. We've been looking only for carbon-based life. And this showed that there is another form of life that was based on arsenic. And then she made the most amazing statement. She said "Now this life-form cannot thrive on Earth because the temperature is too hot. It needs all of its energy just to maintain its steady state, so it cannot expand, propagate, reproduce, it just has to keep accumulating the arsenic to maintain its steady-state existence. However, on another planet where the temperature was much colder than Earth...." and she then said "perhaps on some place like Saturn's moon Titan, where the temperature is 167 below zero it might be possible for such an organism to thrive and propagate." That was [an] Earth-shattering statement. And really the important thing was pointing out that perhaps the paradigm was wrong -- that our assumption that all life, any life, must be based on carbon is a fallacy, it's an erroneous assumption. So they called for reviewing all the previous work that we've done, and to start expanding, opening the window a little wider, in order to see whether or not we missed something."

        Well, of course he's here  referring to the fetching Dr Felisa Wolfe-Simon, known as "Iron Lisa," and the extremophile bacterium she called GFAJ-1. The only things Morningstar got roughly right were "about three years ago" (actually December 2010) and "Mono Lake." The rest of it is absolute balderdash -- he managed to get the story even more wrong than Richard Hoagland did when he reported it at the time.

        Iron Lisa never made the claim that GFAJ-1 was not carbon-based. The organism is carbon-based without any question at all. The claimed arsenic substitution was for phosphorous, not carbon. Duhhhhh.... She never even claimed that arsenic was incorporated into the nucleotide bases which are the four letters of the genetic code^{note 1} (that's the part Hoagland got wrong.) All she said was that, in the low-phosphorous, high-arsenic environment of Mono Lake, this organism has found a way of substituting arsenic for some of the phosphorous in its DNA structural backbone.

        I saw the whole of the press conference on 2nd December 2010, and followed the story carefully. To my knowledge Wolfe-Simon never said that GFAJ-1 was more suited to Titan than Earth, or that it could not thrive in Mono Lake. As most readers of this blog already know, her findings were later discredited by Rosie Redfield and Alex Bradley. "GFAJ" turned out to mean "Get Felisa A Job." The story is quite well told in wikipedia.

        Moving right along, here's AM* again, on a subject I really know a lot about.

21:10 "Dr Levin^{note 2}, who is in charge of the Mars Viking Life research project, and they think they found life, back in 1976 when Viking landed. They did an experiment, and the experiment was to scoop up some dirt and to drop in some nutrients that had a little bit of radioactivity in. And the premise was that if there were any microbial activity in the soil that it would eat the nutrient and exude gases that could be picked up because they were radioactive. Indeed they did. And an announcement was made that there was life on Mars. Then NASA quashed that finding and said that the experiment was wrong, and that they did another experiment that proved it was wrong. Well, the experiment that they did was a different experiment, and it was intentionally conducted to kill any life that was in the soil. I was watching Dr Levin on a show on the Science Channel --it was called "NASA's Secret UFO Files" And he said that what they had done was they had taken soil and cooked it. And then tested that soil for life. And he said "How can you find any life in soil that has been heated in such a way that it would kill any microbial life?" "

        I wrote that I really know about this subject. Yes, indeed -- I was personally right there at JPL as all this was unfolding, making a TV documentary about the very subject of extraterrestrial life for the BBC. So to say I was interested would be an understatement.

        First of all, Gil Levín was not  "in charge of the Mars Viking Life research project." Harold "Chuck" Klein held that position, and Gerry Soffen was overall head of Viking Science. Dr Levín was one of three PIs whose life-detection experiments were carried on each of the two Viking landers.

        Morningstar's description of the Labeled Release experiment is correct, and it's also correct that its results were arguably positive for life. However, his description of the other experiment is woefully, hopelessly, wrong. He must be referring to the Pyrolytic Release experiment -- which, by the way, was not "a NASA experiment" any more than Levín's was. Norman Horowitz of CalTech was the PI.

        Horowitz's strategy was to test for carbon fixation by micro-organisms. He fed the soil water in the presence of radio-labeled carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. After several days, he tested to see if any labeled carbon had been "ingested". The way of doing this was to heat the soil to 650°C and see if any labeled carbon was given off. To say that the experiment "killed microbial life" is thoroughly misleading. The answer to the question "How can you find any life in soil that has been heated in such a way?" is "Very easily. It was done over and over again in trials with all kinds of microbial life before Viking ever flew."

        I blogged about this as long ago as April 2008. Read it again if you want to know why Gil Levín's experiment was not considered definitive in the end.

Now for the good news...
        At the very beginning of his Higherside Chat, Morningstar allowed that he was fallible. That he might make mistakes. He correctly said that being wrong isn't a crime, and that he "welcomed corrections."

Consider yourself corrected, Robert.

=========================
1] There is no phosphorous in adenine, thymine, cytosine or guanine.
2] Small point -- Morningstar mispronounces Dr Levín's name. The accent is on the second syllable. But you have to be a real space buff to know that, not a dilettante like AM*.

Robert Morningstar has his little joke

        Robert Morningstar, the "civilian intelligence analyst," is one of the darlings of internet woo-woo radio. Why? It's simple -- like Hoagland, Bara, Icke, Hancock, Morton etc., you push his button and away he goes. The interviewer doesn't have to think much or even bother to read the trash these clowns write.

        In a recent outing on OffPlanet radio, hosted by Randy Maugans and Chris Holly, Morningstar was off and running with a strange mixture of humor and error. He surely must have been having a little joke when he told us, very early on, that there was more than one space station in orbit. The other one, he explained, belongs to THE SEEKRIT SPACE PROGRAM^{note 1}. It's HUGE, he said, and his mate in Hoboken got a great photo of it just the other day. Why haven't the tens of thousands of other amateur astronomers ever seen this? THAT'S THE JOKE, duhhhhh. He suggested it was actually Black Knight, the well-known hoax story that's been around since 1899.

        There were more jokes to come. The US Army moonbase. The story, attributed to Clark McClelland, about a Nordic alien conferring with astronauts in the Shuttle cargo bay, while a massive Black Triangle mothership hovers in the background. Very funny, Robert. I'm sure NASA would have been thoroughly amused as a massive hazard approached the Shuttle dangerously close. Oh yeah.

Planetary astronomy revised
        Then came the errors. This blog has already reported Morningstar's track record of error in respect of the crashed spaceship on the Moon, the dire prediction of city-destroying earthquakes, and the "hangers" [sic] in some Apollo 17 mapping camera frames. Now this genius of our age gave us the pseudo-fact that Jupiter and Saturn used to be stars, but then lost their fusion reactions and devolved into gas giants. He talked himself into that one because he was developing the theory that the Gray aliens came from Titan, so he needed to warm Titan up a bit. Just to get life started, don'cha know. He says the US Gubbmint has an alliance with the Nordics against the Grays. He wrapped that in with Felisa Wolfe-Simon's arsenic-tolerant extremophile bacteria GFAJ-1 -- managing to misunderstand Wolfe-Simon's research very thoroughly^{note 2}. Oh, maybe this was more joking, come to think of it.

        Then we were off to Mars, with a bullshit notion that the Tharsis Montes are an exact representation of the layout of the pyramids of Giza (they are not), and the pseudo-fact that the very word Cairo means Mars (it does not, it means The Conqueror. A word for Egypt is Mas'r, which has nothing to do with the Red Planet).

        OffPlanet radio's promo described Morningstar as...

"A man you can truly learn from. Men like Morningstar are the men who will reignite our brains in to [sic] finding answers by way of knowledge and great thinking."

        I can only assume that was their little joke. And oh, by the way, this hour of fun-and-games was only Part 1. There's another whole hour to come, but I'm not sure I can stand to listen.

Update:
        In e-mail, Chris Holly questions my credentials and expresses flagrant disgust:

"I ... want nothing to do with whoever this expat jerk is and do find him a hate filled arrogant fool who really thinks he knows what he is talking about but is very mis informed.  Expat needs a name and a punch in his nasty mouth   .  I doubt he has any personal experience at all in any of these subjects much less information that is not soaked in mean spirited rejection of things he knows nothing about due to the fact those things may frighten him poop less."

        I reiterate what I have written previously: I'm an acknowledged expert in the history of Apollo and Shuttle, plus to a lesser extent NASA's Mars and Lunar orbiters. I have met and interviewed key figures in the space programs of the USA and Russia. Contemplating the errors of amateur observers like Robert AM* does not frighten me in the slightest.

        Holly also implies that "Bigelows space station" is the space station AM* was referring to. If so, that is manifestly absurd. How can a Bigelow-designed orbiter belong to the SECRET space program???? Genesis II is not a space station, it's an experimental habitat. It is not, and never could have been, peopled. In addition, AM* specifically referred to something very large, and Bigelow is not Big. Genesis II's pressurized volume is 11.5 m³ (cf. 837 m³ for the ISS). Nice try, Chris Holly. Your pal is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Update 2:
        In a further brief e-mail, I asked Chris Holly how such a small orbiter, with no facilities for human crew, could be classified as a space station. I got this answer:

"Look Expat , go get a life and do not annoy me with your hate and denail of things you can not deal with. How about this , man to woman, get lost I think your a jerk and a loser who I want no part of and do not care about at all what you think, do , go  none of it. I am busy and have no time for you, dime a dozen downers... lets just call you not in my life so  end it now and leave me alone please, I  have a big life with lots going on and really think you should think what you want, and I will do things my way.  Your a NASA bleiver which is hilarious , I bet you love your government and think our fighting men are fools, go away please."

I presume that could all be summed up as "Gee...I don't know."

Update 3:
        Well, I did in fact listen to the second AM* interview, which went way over an hour. As it turned out, there wasn't much of my type of material in it -- other than a reiteration of the obviously false claim that the voice recording equipment in the Apollo Command Module was installed without the astronauts' knowledge. For it to do its job effectively--reporting some terrible accident behind the Moon--they had to know it was there. ^{note 3}

        Almost all of the interview was mythology, UFOs, abductions -- not my area of expertise at all. What stuck in my mind was that AM* claims personal experience of alien encounters. He related how he successfully thwarted an attack by an alien monster reaching a "three-fingered claw" towards him in a bid to steal his soul.

I believe Robert AM* practices psychiatry.
 

==============================

1] He was promoting the Secret Space Program conference, coming to an astonished San Mateo Event Center this summer.
2] He added that Felisa Wolfe-Simon is an example of someone who got slapped down by the "establishment" for daring to suggest there was evidence for extraterrestrial life. The facts are that "Iron Lisa" never said any such thing, and she was slapped down because her research was faulty.
3] Here's the CM instrument panel. If, as AM* claims,  the astronauts didn't know about the voice recorder, they sure must have wondered WTF that switch labeled TAPE RECORDER was down in the bottom row of Panel C.

Tiny bacterium defeats pseudoscientist

        Last night, in a spectacular display of superhuman ignorance, Richard Hoagland managed to ask the wrongest possible question about arsenic substitution in biochemistry, and then capped it by coming up with the most ridiculous possible answer. He wondered aloud to his radio audience of millions why none of the journalists at the afternoon's NASA press conference had asked whether the extremophile bacterium GFAJ-1 came from an extraterrestrial source, and declared that to him the answer was obvious — yes, of course it did. "There is an alien in our midst," he said theatrically.

        To recap, for those who did not follow the day's events, the NASA astrobiology program called the conference to announce a very unusual finding. Geomicrobiologist (and, it turns out, accomplished oboist) Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a rather fetching tousle-haired nerd's dream-girl, took the credit for the discovery that, in conditions of restricted environmental phosphorous, GFAJ-1 can use arsenic instead, in building the DNA backbone upon which it depends to function. Wolfe-Simon had theorized that this might be possible, and had gone to Mono Lake in a successful search for proof.

        It was a pretty brilliant piece of work by Dr Wolfe-Simon, and it took an intellect as puny as that of Richard C. Hoagland to misunderstand it quite that thoroughly.

A nearly toxic lake

        Mono Lake, a couple of hundred miles East of San Francisco, is a natural chemistry experiment gone awry. Indifferent water management over the centuries has made it highly saline and unusually alkaline, and mine tailings from the California gold rush have bequeathed it near-toxic levels of arsenic. Yet gamma-proteobacteria like GFAJ-1 have found a way to make a living there.

        It's one of the best-established principles of evolution that organisms adapt to their environment. If the environment places stress on a population — say by getting hotter, drier, or more acidic — the population is selected for those individuals that tolerate the stress best. Over time, the population either fails to adapt and dies out, or develops a new strain that finds the environment congenial. Well, lo and behold, as Lake Mono became deficient in phosphorous and oversupplied with arsenic, the plucky little bacterium found a way of making do. High arsenic = arsenic-tolerant bacteria. Simple, really. So for Richard Hoagland, with no knowledge of biochemistry whatsoever, to ask which distant galaxy might have seeded the lake with GFAJ-1 is like him finding an apple on the ground under an apple tree and saying "Hmmm, wonder where that came from?"

Sagan misquoted         We did not have to wait long, either, before Hoagland's attempts to justify his error led him deeper into the jungle of misunderstanding. He quoted Carl Sagan to the effect that a different form of DNA would be the hallmark of an extraterrestrial organism. What Sagan actually said was that a different DNA code would be the hallmark. That's a crucially different proposition, because phosphorous (or in the present case, arsenic) takes no part in the genetic code that is DNA's primary business.



        The DNA molecule has been likened to two intertwined spiral staircases — and the metaphor works well up to a point. The four-letter code of A,T,C,G is contained on the stair steps. Where one step is an A, its matching step on the other spiral must be a T. Where one is a C, the other must be a G. However, an actual double stairway would have a central pillar to support the whole structure — and there the metaphor fails because there's no molecular equivalent. Instead the supporting "backbone" of DNA is on the outside — looking more like the handrails of the stairs. And it's here that phosphorous, alternating with what are essentially sugars, plays its essential role. In short, the substitution of arsenic for phosphorous is just a cleverly improvised feat of molecular carpentry and would not signify extraterrestrial origin to anyone with any knowledge of biochemistry.

Testing for life on Mars        Later in the first hour, Hoagland remarked "This marks the first time NASA has grappled with the concept 'What is Life?'" That idea would certainly bring a smile to the face of any of the hundreds of NASA-contracted bioscientists who confronted that very question as the biology instruments for the Viking Mars landers were being designed in the early 1970s. The question defies any easy answer — in fact, the Viking biology group never really made up its collective mind, instead sending three separate instruments each with its own assumption about the sine qua non of Life. It's also worth noting that some people — including Hoagland himself, as it happens — think that, even with 2 belts and one pair of braces, Viking's trousers still fell down.

The numerology of the space shuttle         In the second hour Hoagland took off into the unintentionally comic territory of numerology. I found it hard to follow — it appeared to incorporate a strange form of mathematics in which the numbers 33 and 133 are identical. It came as no surprise, though, that he wanted to make something ritualistic of the fact that the atomic number of arsenic is 33. That's right, Richard — the sinister Masonic conspiracy within NASA reached back across 100 years of history to dump arsenic in Mono Lake for just that reason. Yeah, man.

        I did sort-of follow his next proposition — namely, that the still-upcoming STS-133 space shuttle mission is the first "post-Newtonian" mission. This means, according to Hoaglandian logic, that the energy needed to get the shuttle to orbit will come, not from old-fashioned rocket fuel, but from "hyperdimensional space, torsion physics, and etc. etc. etc." I'm sure this comes as a surprise to everybody involved in the mission.

        A classic Hoaglandian performance, ending with — guess what? — an 800 number that will put cash in the Hoagland pocket.

Way to go, Coast.

Update 1:
Two criticisms of the experiment from biochemists have now surfaced in the blogosphere. Both seem quite harsh.

Rosie Redfield
Alex Bradley

Although it might be entertaining to watch the biochemists slug it out in blogs, you can bet that isn't going to happen. It's just not dignified for the lead author of a paper in a peer-reviewed journal to respond to informal critiques.

Update 2:
Well, surprise—there is now a response from Dr Wolfe-Simon, although not in a blog or a tweet.

Update 3:
STS-133 went from ground to orbit powered by LH2/LO2, just as normal.